Frightening revelation: Connie Basch borrowed a radiation detector and found a hot spot at the kitchen table where her daughter, Kaia, sat.

THE REALITIES OF TREATMENT

Each year, about 28,000 people are offered a radioactive treatment for thyroid cancer. A USA TODAY survey suggests that more than half of them will be treated and sent home, most with information on how to protect their family members from exposure to radiation. The survey's 914 responses generated dozens of wrenching experiences. Reporter Steve Sternberg presents the following story here:

Radioactive iodine was nothing new for Connie Basch, 43, an Arcata, Calif., family physician and mother of 7-year-old Kaia.

Radioactive iodine was nothing new for Connie Basch, 43, an Arcata, Calif., family physician and mother of 7-year-old Kaia.

"I did research in college with iodine 125-labeled proteins," she says, adding that she believes that her laboratory exposure may have caused her thyroid cancer. "You're 25 and believe you're immortal."

She says she could not have imagined then, sitting in her lab, that two decades later she would be swallowing an even more potent form of radioactive iodine.

"I had some trouble getting my head around it, which I'm sure any cancer patient does," she says. "Chemotherapy is the same thing. So is external beam radiation. You have to ingest a poison. You make your peace with it. It's with regard to my daughter that I'm most distressed about it."

The nuclear medical specialist at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, where Basch was treated, counseled her on the challenges she would face while she was emitting radiation. He advised her not to check into a hotel because it might put other people at risk. But first, she would have to get from San Francisco to distant Arcata.

"I was told not to sit in a car with anybody for more than an hour," she says. "The Catch-22 is that I live six hours from where I was treated. So I drove myself home after receiving my dose, despite being profoundly hypothyroid and nauseated — which may have endangered others on the road as well as me."

Basch isolated herself for three days, sending her daughter to spend two weeks with her ex-partner. Even then, she worried about the risk she might pose to her daughter and spent time in isolation studying I-131 exposure. "I found one paper that said one-4,000th of my dose was enough to give my daughter thyroid cancer," she says. "Less than that is a potentially safe exposure; more than that raises her risk."

So she borrowed her hospital's radiation detector and used it to see whether, despite her precautions, she had contaminated her house. What she found scared her. "There was a hotspot at the kitchen table where my daughter sits," she says. "There were two more on the kitchen counter. You're that radioactive. Your sweat can contaminate things."

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